They don’t call it Taxachusetts for nothing.
Less than a year after Massachusetts voters legalized marijuana, legislators came to a grand bargain on Monday over taxes on pot that strikes smokers as neither grand nor a bargain.
The Massachusetts General Court looks to impose a 20 percent maximum tax on weed sales in the Bay State. The shift more than doubles the excise tax on pot.
Ballot question four, which passed 54 percent to 46 percent in November 2016, permitted a 3.75 excise tax on marijuana purchases atop the state’s 6.25 sales tax. Additionally, the ballot initiative allowed cities and towns to collect at two percent of marijuana sales. The legislation needing the approval of Governor Charlie Baker jacks-up the voter-approved excise tax from 3.75 percent to 10.75 percent and allows localities to take three percent of every sale rather than the two percent permitted by the initiative.
The House sought to tax reefer at 28 percent. The Senate wanted to tax it at 12 percent. The people wanted to tax it at 12 percent. Rather than defer to the expressed wishes of the voters, the legislators met in their middle. The legislation, soon presented to the Republican governor, imposes a maximum tax of 20 percent on marijuana sales.
The bill allows locales that voted against the initiative to prohibit dispensaries in their limits by a simple vote of selectmen, city council, or town meeting. But in the roughly three-quarters of the commonwealth’s communities that favored the measure, banning marijuana sales would require a referendum. Lawmakers also added a section on promoting racial diversity within the industry and expanded the state’s Cannabis Control Commission from three to five members.
The increased governmental role comes as a shock to some libertarians championing last year’s legalization vote. Instead of decriminalized marijuana, law in Massachusetts since 2010, pot smokers now encounter a highly-bureaucratized bud sold by companies with the government pocketing $2 for every dime bag.
Still, it could be worse. Pot smokers could inhale a product that really, really invokes the ire of sin-taxers. The state imposes a $3.51 tax per pack of cigarettes atop the $1.01 federal rate. And other states tax marijuana at a considerably higher rate. California, for instance, imposes a 15 percent excise tax on marijuana sales atop local taxes, the state sales tax, and a tax on marijuana growers.
The good news for cash-strapped dope diehards? That guy you know with a stringy mullet who wears concerts t-shirts to work the way others wear Brooks Brothers? He’s still not too big on rules and continues to sells joints without paying protection money to Big Brother.
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